The Arduino Tre, Courtesy of Texas Instruments

December 10, 2013 | 14:37

The Arduino Tre, Courtesy of Texas Instruments

With the millionth Raspberry Pi rolling off the assembly line, major chip manufacturers are beginning to take the hardware hacker community seriously. Following Intel’s launch of its Arduino Galileo board, Arduino have announced an alliance with TI to produce the Tre. The board is made up of ...

With the millionth Raspberry Pi rolling off the assembly line, major chip manufacturers are beginning to take the hardware hacker community seriously. Following Intel’s launch of its Arduino Galileo board, Arduino have announced an alliance with TI to produce the Tre.

The board is made up of two systems; the central white silk screened area the size of an Arduino Uno has an 16 MHz Atmel ATmega32u4 with 32 KB flash, 2.5 KB SRAM and 1 KB EEPROM. Pin sockets accept standard Arduino shields and two 10-way connector strips take a Digi XBee wireless card. It has 14 digital I/Os, 7 PWM outputs and 6 (+ 6 multiplexed) analog inputs.

Making up the rest of the board is a TI Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 processor capable of running full Linux. This chip also has two 200 MHz 32-bit Programmable Real-time Unit (PRU) microcontrollers. Running at 1 GHz the Sitara is a tad faster than the RPi’s 700 MHz ARM11 processor. It has 512 MB (DDR3L) on-board RAM and a micro SD slot. Connectivity options include 4 USB 2.0 ports and 1 USB 2.0 client, an Ethernet 10/100 port, HDMI display, SPI, CAN, UART and 3.3 V I/Os.

This is a powerful platform and forms a complete development environment for the Arduino. The board will be available in the spring of 2014, price TBA.